On: Dark Web Drug Sellers Dodge Police Crackdowns

[rolltiide]

This is a really good article on this topic: this is the first mainstream news article I've seen on this topic that wasn't fearmongering and instead showed how benign the services are and merely acknowledged their existence and the accurate complacency of the expanding user base. On the other side, the only other literature are the official releases from governments grandstanding about their takedown efforts, where they aren't even acknowledging that the markets have only grown and gotten more resilient because of their efforts.

This article balances that all in reality very well.

It doesn't mix up the terms Deep and Dark web. It doesn't feel the need to explain how bitcoin works, it acknowledges the prevalence of Monero. It mentions the current marketplaces and TOR news sites, it shows the perspective of the software engineers running the websites who realize that prior takedowns are largely a result of error and laziness.

Lets do more journalism like that

[wallace_f → rolltiide]

Granted, you're basically right; but still reads as biased to me.

What if they replaced terms like "narcotics traficking" with "drug purchases?"

What if they changed "authorities" to "creeps with badges stalking ordinary people for buying drugs?"

Remember when the Panama Papers were leaked... And nothing happened?

Our taxpayer dollars are diverted to this crusade and so shouldn't we just call it what it is?

[nyolfen → wallace_f]

"this is good journalism, reporting solid facts without unnecessary skew and invective"

"yes, but what if we used skew and invective instead"

[rolltiide → wallace_f]

(a lot happened with the Panama and Paradise Papers, most of it was benign, some of it had consequences for people whether laws were or weren't broken for those people)

[rolltiide → wallace_f]

I understand, some things won't gain consensus today so its more productive to report what is happening and this article is much closer to that

[gwern → rolltiide]

The benefits of experience: Popper has been on the cryptocurrency beat for a long time and has a good idea what he's talking about. (His Bitcoin book, _Digital Gold_, also won't make you want to throw it against the wall.)

[twrand92688 → rolltiide]

(couldn't agree more with what and how you said that!)

One thing that the article did not mention is that parts of the world apparently now have semi private comunitys run inside sometimes proprietary commercially run walled gardens used to build semi reliable channels for exchanging goods locally. Delivering sometimes not via Standard Post but closer to real-time and possibly even with out the need of a "delivery name/address".

This can and apparently even is sometimes done with a small RL "onion" fulfillment layers used for delivery in which each of three nodes never sees any of the peers.

It will be interesting to see with what mechanisms the merchants and markets will come up with.